Various favourable circumstances combined at that time to cause Cornelius to be specially looked upon by his contemporaries as an incomparable master. Since Tiepoli, German monumental art had remained dormant. The frescoes at Munich were the first attempts made to revive it. And it seemed as though with Cornelius, German art had at once risen to the dizzy heights to which Italian art had been led by Michael Angelo. The lookers-on believed in Buonarotti's resurrection. As in the Sistine "Last Judgment," the movement of his heroic figures appeared plastic and pathetic, and his types, not excepting the women, gave that impression of the terrible, which none but Signorelli and Michael Angelo had attained before him. His advent, it was said, might almost make one believe in a kind of metempsychosis; as though the spirit of the great Florentine master, that giant of the Renaissance, had been restored to humanity. At that very period the Italian art of the Cinquecento enjoyed the exclusive favour of the German scholars. It alone was worthy of imitation; in it the æsthetic philosophers sought for rules and laws to govern the development of art. And as they thought that all the qualities of this artistic method were to be found in the works of Cornelius, it was only logical to arrive at the conclusion which the Crown Prince Ludwig summed up in the following words: "There has been no painter like Cornelius since the Cinquecento." [Illustration: PETER CORNELIUS.] At the same time the intellectual character of his work harmonised with the wishes of a period in which the leaders of German thought tried to forget the dreary dulness of life by plunging into the most profound speculations. "What does it matter," writes Hallman, "if we lack all joyous, independent national feeling? What though we do not even try to resuscitate this feeling with wars and battles? We strive after something higher! The world is beginning to respect German intellect and learning. We believe that in this we are in advance of other nations, and we seek a mode of expression, we want to give a form to that lofty thought through our art, in order that we may bequeath to posterity an image of our fortunate condition.... Therefore it is a remarkable sign of the times that painting strives to make the weighty output of intellectual thought a common treasure of all who are neither able nor disposed to follow speculation to its dizzy heights, nor erudition to its lowest depths; that painters try to transform the results of those investigations into fresh and ever lively conceptions--the element of art." To accomplish this none was better fitted than Cornelius. What a weight of thought and learning his works display!